Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

‘A thousand dollars for an hour of filming,’ said Mr Shaker, and added: ‘that’s a very high rate, I hope you realise.’

Kukla translated all that for Mevludin.

‘Tell him to forget it,’ said Mevlo.

‘Three thousand!’ said Mr Shaker.

‘I’m not interested, what good are dollars to me? Just look at it, it’s stuck and it won’t go down,’ said Mevlo, directing his message to no one in particular.

‘Five thousand.’

‘Are you deaf or do you just need your ears cleaned!? I’m not interested; that’s all there is to it!’

Now Mevlo was addressing Mr Shaker, who was looking to Kukla for help. Kukla, of course, did not translate what Mevludin had said.

‘He says he’s a bit nervous about the offer,’ she said.

‘Seven thousand!’ said Mr Shaker, adding, almost angrily: ‘tell Mr Mevličko that one job leads to another. I have connections in Hollywood. I’m sure that a man of his appearance will easily make a career in film as well.’

‘A career! In your dreams! I won’t have my picture taken, I won’t have folk in Bosnia seeing me like this and taking the piss,’ Mevlo dug his heels in.

‘Ten thousand!’ said Mr Shaker angrily. ‘For God’s sake, not even Naomi gets more!’

‘Naomi who?’ asked Mevlo.

‘Naomi Campbell, the model,’ explained Kukla.

‘Oh yeah, Naomi wouldn’t get out of bed for less than twenty thousand,’ said Mevludin impassively.

‘How the hell do you know, if I may ask?’ said Mr Shaker, who was quite furious by now.

‘Whoopi told me.’

‘Whoopi who?’ asked Kukla.

‘Whoopi Goldberg.’

It sounded unlikely, but in fact the name of Whoopi Goldberg had caught Mr Shaker’s eye when he was examin ing the list of famous guests at the Grand Hotel.

At that moment a young girl in a flowery summer dress, with clogs on her bare feet, approached the table. She had a pale round face scatteredown and, parting her legs a little, began rubbing her right ankle with her left foot.

‘My daughter Rosie,’ said Mr Shaker testily. His face showed the inner fleet of his hopes slowly sinking.

The girl, staring more at the ice cream dripping down the sides of her cornet than at those present, shifted the cone from her right to her left hand and offered her right hand to Kukla, then to Mevludin. A drop of ice cream slipped out of the cornet and fell onto Mevludin’s hand. Mevlo gave a start, gazing at the little drop like a gold coin that had fallen from the heavens straight onto his hand, and then he licked it attentively and smiled.

‘Tell him,’ he said quietly, ‘that I accept…’

And then he came right up to Mr Shaker’s face and repeated:

‘I em in!’

Mr Shaker hastily took out his chequebook, wrote a cheque for a considerable advance and handed it to Mevludin. Admittedly, he did this more to impress Kukla than the stubborn young Bosnian.

And what about us? We push on. Life may linger, lurking for the attack, but the tale moves on, without looking back.

2.

After a cosmetic treatment for her face, Beba decided to try something else from the rich array on offer. The promotional brochure offered bathing in hay made from meadow grasses, bathing in a mash made from oat flakes (That must be quite disgusting, thought Beba), bathing in seaweed, then various kinds of massage… Beba finally chose ‘Sweet Dreams’ – a special treatment, consisting of being steeped in a bath of warm chocolate followed by a massage. First, of course, she asked Pupa whether she could put it all on the room bill. Pupa had no objection, on the contrary:

‘Just you go and have a good soak. When you come out you’ll be like a chocolate truffle!’ she said.

A young woman in a white hospital gown led Beba into a space that looked like a film set. It was a small room with an antique copper bath in the middle. The walls were covered in greenish silk wallpaper, on one wall there was a reproduction of Renoir’s Woman with Parrot, and under it, on an old-fashioned flower stand, there was a fern. How kitschy, thought Beba. What had induced the designer to connect the greenish wallpaper, the bath and its function – with the reproduction on the wall?

Here one might add that the presence of fine art in all the rooms was one of the most striking features of the Wellness Centre. It was Dr Topolanek’s doing. He considered that agreeable and unobtrusive education delayed the process of ageing just as moderate exercise did, so he had arranged for the Wellness Centre to be literally ‘clothed’ in reproductions of well-known paintings, mostly classic art. For instance, at the entrance to the Centre he had placed a reproduction of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Fountain of Youth – a painting that was the symbolic representation of the fruits of Topolanek’s professional efforts.